On July 31st, Siemens Energy announced it could hold back wind turbine deliveries for up to seven months as it is still racing to identify technical problems on some of its models.

Siemens Energy wind turbines issue

At the end of June, the company reported failures at some of its wind turbines caused by quality issues in certain components such as rotor blades and bearings. The issues are only impacting part of Siemens’ 108GW onshore turbine fleet and seem to be concentrated on the most recent platforms – 4.X and 5.X. The 4.X platform includes two turbine models, each with a 5MW capacity. The 5.X platform includes three turbine models, with capacities ranging between 6.6MW and 7MW each. It is estimated between 15% to 30% of the fleet could potentially be impacted.

The group announced that the problems could take years to rectify and cost more than EUR1 billion to fix. No information has been disclosed on the suppliers involved.

Earlier in 2021, Siemens had already flagged issues with the 5.X model, with higher production ramp-up costs than planned.

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Image Credit: Dario de Corso, Unsplash